tried calling, no answer or busy.

They decided to hike my rate up w/o warning...doesnt this void the contract?

web site down, no mail...??? wtf?

There was an outage caused by Verizon last week which was blamed on our Core Cisco Router by Verizon. The same problem returned at 4:02AM yesterday at which time we purchased a new router and installed it yesterday. Once the new router was in place the problem still continued and Verizon arrived admitting it was a problem with their Nortel OC12 Fiber equipment. The problem was resolved by Verizon late yesterday and now we are operating with a new Core Cisco Router and Verizon keeping a close eye on their own equipment until they are sure the problem is resolved. Internet providers all have equipment failures at some point and we are all at the mercy of the TELCO's when fiber connectivity fails. As your provider we quickly acted and purchased a complete replacement Cisco 7204VXR Core router to avoid delays in returning service to operational. We did not take the cheap route of trouble shooting by replacing individual cards one by one while trying to isolate the trouble to take the cheaper more service affecting route. We were unable to answer phones due to the high volume of calls and had everyone assisting us in locating the replacement router locally yesterday.

If you are having service trouble or problems with connectivity you can email support@oswi.net and it will be reviewed by the CEO of our company and will be addressed. Posting on this site doesn't tell us who you are so we can't help you directly.

Oh, trust me, I've emailed several times and have never gotten a reply other than an automated one so I gave up. Asking for someone to come look at it always comes to one of two solutions with your customer support "Have YOU tried new equipment?" or "Sure we can send someone out for a hundred bucks."

You mean the same response you get from any service provider the one that states "If the technician finds the trouble to be with your equipment it will be a billable service call" that's standard in the industry. You don't roll service trucks to fix customers own problems for free. There are costs associated with fuel, labor, insurance, etc... If you know the problem is not caused by your own equipment then you won't be charged for a service call... if you can't be sure then authorize us to come out and if we are the cause of the issue we will fix it for free. If you have something connected wrong then you should pay for us to help you fix it.
The funny thing is you are getting repsonses here after sending an email yet you haven't sent one to our support and you intentionally are not saying who you are so how can we help you with anything. You may not even be a customer of ours and you are just from a competitor. Quit hiding and tell us who you are so we can help resolve the issue otherwise quit slamming us when we are trying to help you.

Yeah but are you sure it's not your fault? What kind of problem resolution have you engaged in? Lifted a finger to help yourself or is it simply your determination that someone else is just at fault and to blame and why haven't they fixed you yet? Have you even done ping and traceroute? Are you sure you're not at fault? What does your router say? Are you pppoe? Does it say that pppoe is up? Are you sure you're not at fault? What about packet loss? Does ping testing to local targets work? How about to www.yahoo.com? Are you sure you're not to blame and at fault for using wireless devices which conflict with yourself? Have you eliminated yourself as being at fault and to blame by testing with other equipment, removing any and all routers or wireless accesspoints from the mix so that you are connected directly to the service and not 'going thru' anything of your own which could be at fault and to blame? We could spend all night talking about your fault and blame and your responsibility to not screw yourself up and how you need to make sure that your #$@*# doesn't stink before calling the kettle black if so...........

...Or we could instead just look at the problem and figure out what's not working, in a cooperative, dispassionate and neutral tone that simply looks at facts. Determining fault and blame doesn't help anyone, it simply identifies YOU as the responsible party, because you've done nothing to help yourself. It sounds to me like the real problem here is that you aren't participating in the problem resolution process and that you're content to just point a finger and let it go at that. And if I were this company, I'd be disinclined to spend any resources on you at all, or at least, until your behavior changes and you decide that you wish to participate.

Looking at the problem in a cooperative, dispassionate and neutral tone got me nowhere. It's pretty difficult to resolve anything with your ISP when you leave voice-mails, but they fail to return calls. The only hours their 24/7 tech support seem to be in the office are 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday. That happens to be when I'm at work. Of the many voicemails I've left, I can only recall one return call.

As a matter of fact, I have tried all of your suggestions. The only wireless in my house is their wireless canopy system. No wireless phones, no other wireless network hardware, cell phones powered off, and the connection lasts less than 5 minutes on average. I've been trying to resolve this with the ISP for several months. The service has only gotten worse. Their "Tech Support," who also says he owns the company, told me to use a switch instead of a router because their CPE does it's own DHCP. I bought a switch, installed it, and there was no improvement. They told me to run their CPE directly into my network card on my PC. I tried that (with every PC in the house). Service didn't change one bit. I've tried to run multiple network diagnostics. The computers on the network can all connect with each other seamlessly. They all die at the CPE. I brought home a laptop which hadn't been hooked up to any network prior to this. I plugged the cpe into the network jack, booted, and set it to acquire a network address from the cpe. Again, dead internet in 5 minutes.

I have pinged sites from coast to coast and overseas. I've run tracert's. They work for a couple of minutes, then go dead. I've talked with their support staff many times. I'm fed up with being told to "Power down everything - the CPE, the computer, the works. Unplug the cpe from the computer. Wait a minute and then power them back up." Within 5 minutes of restarting everything, the internet connection is toast again.

I know their system can do better. I thought it was great when I signed the contract a year and a half ago. If you have any other ideas on how to get a stable connection from their system, I'd love to give them a try. However, the unregistered anonymous posting sounds eerily similar to the owner of OSWI.net's rants when I've called to complain about paying for service so unreliable. Take it for what it's worth.

Mr. Vanwinkle we recently moved and have had some afterhour phone system issues and we appologize for that. We never heard from you during business hours regarding this problem but after reviewing what you stated the problem was we realized it was caused by a faulty GPS circuit board which was having intermittent failure making it almost impossible to even see the problem since all systems were up and runnning and responding to our monitoring systems. When the card finally failed completely we were unsure if anyone had experienced prior trouble until i just read your post. If you currently are having any trouble you can email us at support@oswi.net and an automated trouble ticket will be created on our side and you will be contacted during normal business hours to troubleshoot. You can also contact us at 1-877-GOT-WIFI from 8:30AM - 5:00PM. The emergency after hours paging system is for Business accounts and a call is only returned for residential callers if the network is found to be down.

Scott when you originally tried to order service you were told you would most likely be beyond the limitation of 15 Miles which is a Motorola Quality of Service limitation. Oswi went through the motions of spending time and money to send a install crew to your house and attempt to try and get you service for which you paid nothing even though it cost Oswi about $400.00 to make the attempt. The service contract you claim you have is not valid since we were not able to provide you service at the time of install and for that matter every person that enquires about our service receives a copy of the service contract and may even sign it, that would still not mean we have a binding contract unless we accept it at the time of install and provide services for a fee. We tried to help you become part of the broadband world, even though Oswi does not service many residential subscribers. Oswi has been requesting Motorola to increase the maximum range on the hardware for over 1 year, and we diligently tried to use your house as an example once again to prove the hardware would work at longer distances. However Oswi does not control Motorola and can only make requests. During the months after we attempted to install service for you a resident in your town offered the use of a windmill on their property in exchange for business services from Oswi. At that time Oswi evaluated the costs of building this site and the return on the investment and determined since most likely only residential orders would be made and the fact there would be very few at that, Oswi could not build the site without increasing the costs for installation and monthly service pricing. During that same period Oswi was already reviewing the costs of providing residential service at all of its tower locations and the much higher demand it creates for technical support and determined a price increase was needed to continue offering residential services. The decision was made to increase the rates prior to launching the service in Phelan from the new tower.
If Motorola had increased the range limitation on the equipment we would have easily honored the rate you were quoted since we would not have needed to build out a new tower to provide the services to you.

Don't forget Oswi.net does not limit the amount of bandwidth you can use per month nor do you have issues using VPN or other protocols over our wireless service. Oswi also uses proprietary equipment made by Motorola and it is not vulnerable to the problems and security risks of WI-FI equipment used by other wireless and satellite providers.

Oswi.net

This is why I called in the 1st place, to see if it was even worth your time to come out. I had my doubts about receiving service but you were pretty gun-ho about sending out an installer anyway.

It doesn't matter that the piece of paper (service contract) "I do" have isn't valid, you didn't honor the price I was quoted from 4 months before.

What does matter is I was told the price would be $59.99/month when I was a pending customer waiting for OSWI to make good with the service. When the service became available you raised my price but not the price of your existing customers and you think that is fair. Once you installed something on my house and left me hanging for 4 months, I was basically a customer. I just thought after waiting and getting the run-a-round you could have given me the price of the existing customers. Then I would be posting how great my service is instead of this disappointing chain of events.

There is no doubt you did every thing in your power to get me service at my house but I feel I was flat out lied to when I called about the ETA of the Motorola service extension. Why would you tell me that it would be 1 month or a couple weeks when really you had been trying for a year already.

I would have loved to be one of your customers but after this incident how can I be sure your are not going to raise your prices again? I don't want to be locked in a 3 year contract with you having that option.

Scott:

In response to your review regarding the price increase for our service and it not being "fair", I would like to clarify that I did NOT state to you that I agreed that it wasn't "fair". What I told you was that I'm sorry that the price went up and that I had no control over it, but these were the new prices and you could now could service in your area.

I am sorry for posting that, I did not mean to get you in trouble with your boss. That was your personal opinion and you did try your best to help me out with the price situtation. You were speaking as another human being not as an employee.

Did you check with mminternet.com? They may be able to offer service there and give you a bit better pricing. They are out of Long Beach and hav served me well in Hemet for 3 years now.

Their is no DSL available in his area so checking mminternet would not help. Also did you see the poster is happy with the service.